Character Profile At Root Division

Jacques Lacan

Character Profile

Group Show at Root Division

Curated By Jon Fischer

July 10-27, 2013

A visual arts exhibition featuring projects that explore intersections between the forms, mechanisms and meanings of language.

Drawing from a cross disciplinary group of twenty-six collaborators from across the country including writers, visual artists, and craftspeople, Character Profile investigates novel functions of language through a broad range of materials, media and approaches. Many of these works are dedicated to a spirit of engagement and play. The exhibition highlights art designed for direct interaction with visitors and work that provokes expanded meanings and alternative associations. These artists present language as both a medium and a subject, and deftly maneuver words to both convey and critique meaning.

Why does a sad story make us cry? What’s going on in our mind when a good joke makes us laugh out loud? Can we possibly explain how the made-up sounds and marks we call words and letters have such a big impact on us?

We use language every day and rarely ever stop using it long enough to wonder at how strange and amazing its very existence is. While many animals and plants communicate, the system of inventing and assigning sounds and symbols (words) to things and combining them into sentences using a common structure (grammar) is uniquely human. The system allows us to convey complex ideas freely and easily and is, perhaps, our greatest evolutionary adaptation. It is the foundation of all human achievement, compassion, and altruism. It is also the means by which structures of power have oppressed, and a prison in which people have lost their minds.

Visual art is uniquely suited to examine something so ubiquitous as language. When we enter a gallery, we arrive prepared to stop and search its contents for underlying implications or personal meaning. And whereas some degree of experience and specialized knowledge are sometimes required for engaging with contemporary art, our shared experience of language--the very thing that makes it work-- is a thread that includes us all.

It is with this focus on engagement that the artists in this exhibition have been charged to work out the beauty, weirdness, joy, and possibilities of language. Some have used text as a medium like paint, while others use it to both convey and critique meaning. Through a broad range of materials, media, and approaches, these new works give us the opportunity to pause and reconsider language for the odd, fantastic creation it is.

In the Twentieth century, some of the world’s greatest thinkers made it their life work to unlock the mystery of human communication. Their goal was essentially an explanation of every language that ever existed in all of human history. The resulting theory identifies language as an imaginary structure in our mind, in which there are two primary phenomena:

Replacement/Metaphor: In which individual things we wish to talk about are assigned their own individual word, symbol, sound, or any other kind of unique sign.

But as languages evolve over time, overlaps, glitches, and mistakes abound. In this imperfect system, context is everything.

In the Twentieth century, some of the world’s greatest thinkers made it their life work to unlock the mystery of Donkey Kong.

When we assign words, sounds, symbols, to represent individual things, we create a sign. Signs have two components:

• A signifier: the form which the sign takes:

• The signified: the concept it represents:

You may enter the business.

Signs take the form of words, images, sounds, odors, flavors, acts or objects, but such things have no intrinsic meaning and become signs only when we invest them with meaning.

As modern culture becomes increasingly saturated with media images, new cultural forms and expressions, consumerist trends and needs, there has been a remarkable proliferation of signs.

Many scientists, artists, psychologists, and philosophers have described the signifier-sign pattern operating in areas outside of language. Some very smart people have begun to wonder if the exponential pace of modernity is thrusting us so deep into the world of signs we might become trapped.

Any text can be reduced to a data sequence. The
rules of grammar are largely analogous to the
parameters of a computer algorithm.

If our thoughts, interactions, and feelings are all
filtered through the structure of language, to what
extent can our experience of consciousness
therefore be reduced to a sequence of information?
Does it follow that our minds could one day be stored
in a computer or perhaps the electromagnetic
fabric of the universe?

“The loudest voice will be the voice that speaks for
those who lost their voice.”